WILL THE FALL OF SOVIET COMMUNISM BE FOLLOWED SHOR…

December 30, 2006 — Tiernan O Faolain

WILL THE FALL OF SOVIET COMMUNISM BE FOLLOWED SHORTLY BY…

the fall of American Rationalized Capitalism? We certainly seem to be losing our hemispheric satellites! We’ve even managed to elect a ‘liberal-leaning’ Congress just now, and if we’re lucky, it may begin to dismantle our last harsh, ‘conservative’ regime – not democratically-elected at that. And a recent neocon mag pronounced the death of globalization with a beached ship on its cover!

Of course, that will still leave forms of Rationalized Corporate Rule in Britain (pace Her Majesty), the EU/Brussels, and Australia, maybe like the world still has Communist China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba – ‘liberalizing,’ like “capitalism with a human face.”

(“Rationalized Capitalism” isn’t small-time family shops and farms and crafts and merchant/traders, or even larger Sovereign-dominated limited corporations serving real public needs. It’s the anal-retentive, stingy, hyperactive, “Protestant work ethic,” megasized, hyper-exploitive, wage-slavery, excess profiteering, power-hungry, manipulative, inhumane, uncaring, “invisible hand”-trusting, “law of the jungle” [sic], “rugged individualistic,” world-consuming, Globe-Warming, warmongering, imperialistic, militaristic, fascistic, corporatistic/Big Business, anti-traditional, amoral/immoral, ruthlessly calculating, hyper-“scientific,” “bootstraps,” anti-welfare [pun intended!] kind best represented by early industrialism, robber barons, “neoconservatism”/neoliberalism, deregulation, globalization…and in fiction, Scrooge and the Ferengi. The label “rationalized” normally refers to the hyper-calculating, “scientific,” penny-pinching, profit-maximizing approach…but since sociologist Max Weber saw its rise linked so closely to that of Calvinist Puritan Protestant Christianity in Britain and even more so in America [arguably since Britain has always retained a culturally-dominant Broad Church], the other meaning of “rationalized” is also appropriate: reasoning how what you’re doing is good, moral, virtuous, Biblical, God-ordained, and for the Common Good, when it doesn’t seem so, even seems the opposite of these things.)